Laptop recording system

[conovera]

I just acquired a Lenovo T60p and want to enlist it to rip 2500+ CDs in library. Looking to add external storage via eSATA, external burner via USB or eSATA and external USB sound card to receive analog in for tape library/vinyl conversion. Looking for suggestions to preserve quality, maximize productivity and provide safe backups. Anyone with suggestions or experience using Icy Dock or Addionics external storage units? Good USB CD burners? External audio cards. I want to do this project once and do it right. Thanks for any advice.

 

[TheStu]

I hear good things about Icy Dock, and I think that Anand just reviewed them recently so you may want to check that out. Bear in mind that the enclosure is only half the battle (much like 'knowing'! ) and that you need to find a suitable hard drive to put it in. Also, what quality were you looking to rip at as that would determine the size hard drive that you would need. Also, are you looking to then duplicate this library? So you have the original songs on CDs and LPs, then your playback copy on the hard drive... are you going to have another copy on another hard drive? One where you copy the files over, unplug the drive and then stick that in some sort of relatively environmentally stable location (frankly a closet in an air conditioned home would probably do it)?

 

[conovera]

Plan so far is buy a pair of 750G drives, connect via an expresscard eSATA device to act as main library, then make full backups and the second drive and spirit it off to work (where it may be put into use via USB connection to Zpro for playback). I don't want to tax my laptop's internal burner, so wanted to burn through an external drive connected either through the eSATA or USB connections. Problem would be that the expresscards only have 2 ports that I would need for the 2 750 drives. So I wondering whether burning on an external drive via USB through laptop and saving out to 750G eSATA would offer the necessary throughput to churn through a mountain of music. I haven't decided ripping format yet, but may be compressed as low as 192AAC. The Addionics box would allow 4-5 drives + burner to mount in a separate enclosure with shared powersource and cooling, but I'm not totally comfortable with using a eSATA port multiplier at this point unless others have had good experiences with it. I may just buy a couple of separate Icy Docks and loading 750s in each and using them alternately via eSATA and USM.

 

[TheStu]

If you are talking multiple drives, you may want to consider a firewire enclosure since you can daisy chain those. No idea however if the 4pin firewire that is likely on your laptop supports enough bandwidth though.

 

[conovera]

Good suggestion, though I have no native firewire on the T60, and adding it wouldn't be that much better than the USB2 would it?

 

[TheStu]

Good call on not going lossless. As an extreme, 2500CDs each with 80min of music on them, at lossless compression yields 1.6TB (literally TB, I didn't want to hassle with the whole TB TiB thing) of music... so a lot

 

[conovera]

I figure since I'm not disposing of the original source material, that'll be my lossless set.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: TheStu
Good call on not going lossless. As an extreme, 2500CDs each with 80min of music on them, at lossless compression yields 1.6TB (literally TB, I didn't want to hassle with the whole TB TiB thing) of music... so a lot

Probably not nearly that much. Lossless doesn't mean "no compression", and, as you implied, it's not going to be 80min per CD.

 

[corkyg]

I put this together a couple of years ago

Rip

Since then, I have replaced the laptop with a T60, and added an eSATA external drive. There is an external DVD burner (Lightscribe) as well as the T60's built in burner.

This enables me to handle just about any audio format as a source.

Fun stuff!

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: erwos

Originally posted by: TheStu
Good call on not going lossless. As an extreme, 2500CDs each with 80min of music on them, at lossless compression yields 1.6TB (literally TB, I didn't want to hassle with the whole TB TiB thing) of music... so a lot

Probably not nearly that much. Lossless doesn't mean "no compression", and, as you implied, it's not going to be 80min per CD.

I realize that, which is why I didn't just multiply 2500 by 700 to get my numbers... I have found that most lossless codecs use around 8MB/min of music. So, for 200,000 minutes of music, you are looking at 1,600,000 MB of audio. That was how I reached my conclusion.

But, since he isnt ripping lossless it is moot, I was just pointing out what it would take (in storage) at an extreme if it were lossless

 

[conovera]

Is the burner connected via USB or eSATA?

 

[conovera]

Forgot to ask what expresscard you're using to connect to the eSATA drive?